Tag Archives: processing

Photograms at the Alt-Photo Festival

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I had a wonderful time at the Alt-Photo exhibition in the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens yesterday - not only seeing work by Alastair Cook, Alex Boyd, Lucy Telford and others (it is always a delight to see actual prints, rather than just images on a computer screen) - but also having the opportunity to create photograms, something I had never done before. The process of creating a photogram is very simple, but offer great potential to create unusual and conceptually-stimulating images. Kenny Bean, the organiser of the Alt-Photo Festival, led the workshop. Here are my five efforts…

First photogram - layers of leaves

First photogram - layers of leaves

Photograms are a form of camera-less photography: light-sensitive paper has objects placed over it to prevent or change the amount of light that can reach it, and the paper is then subjected to a light, and put through standard developer baths, and washed and dried. And that is all there is to it!

Second photogram - an image of halves

Second photogram - an image of halves

Kenny had 5″x7″ wooden frames for us, with a clear sheet of plastic over the top, and a collection of all kinds of interesting leaves and plants - this was all taking place in the Botanics! - that we could place onto the plastic, along with scissors to manipulate and cut the leaves as we wanted - as you can see, for the second image above I cut half the needles off each little piece. Having arranged the image, the frame was taken through to the darkroom, photographic paper inserted under the plastic, and this was then exposed under an enlarger light. All the images here were exposed for between 6 and 20 seconds. Then the paper goes into the developer (60s), stop bath (10s), fixer (60s), and then washed in a tub of water and left to dry. The key issue here is the length of time that the enlarger is on for: too short and insufficient light gets through the leaves and there is no detail of leaf veins etc., but too long, and it burns through.

Kenny told us that each time we went into or out of the darkroom we were to whistle a tune so that we’d avoid running into people who might be going in the other direction. I can’t whistle, but after the delight of making the first two images and beginning to appreciate the possibilities here, I was cheerfully singing to myself anyway. The song going through my head at this time was Karine Polwart’s Hole in the heart (from her Scribbled in Chalk album), that I’d been listening to in the morning:

This resulted in an obvious kind of image:

Third photogram - Karine Polwart, "Hole in the heart"

Third photogram - Karine Polwart, “Hole in the heart”

I wanted to try something with more fragile leaves, since the first and third exposures had not shown the veins in the leaves in the way I had hoped for (I had guessed the exposures incorrectly):

Fourth photogram - delicate leaves

Fourth photogram - delicate leaves

My fifth image was intended to be a representation of a simple bunch of flowers, trying out something with the fine needles to see if I could use them as I wanted for my final image, which would be a bit more intricate:

Fifth photogram - a bunch of flowers

Fifth photogram - a bunch of flowers

That worked just the way I wanted - but I didn’t manage to actually create my final image because I ran out of time. This means I have a great excuse to get do more with photograms at some point!

Why is this process so wonderful? I had great fun, but after an hour practising in a workshop I don’t think I’m really qualified to answer this question. However, I am really struck by the fact that the process is so simple, and therefore it doesn’t get in the way of creativity. It is sort of obvious to use leaves to create images, and a quick online search turns up lots of photograms a bit like my fourth image here. That’s lovely, but just like the ‘arty’ Lensbaby blurs of flowers, a bit boring after one has seen the first few. The challenge with this process is very obviously in the pre-visualisation of something new, something that speaks of a wider concern or interpretative need, something that other photographic processes can’t achieve, for whatever reason. If you want to look at some rather amazing examples of what I mean, take some time for Lucy Telford’s photograms: she is creating really thought-provoking and emotional images (in colour too - apparently that’s even more difficult!).

Finally, if you haven’t previously been to the Alt-Photo Festival, make sure you go (if not this year, then next…). All the developer and paper used were provided by those lovely people at Ilford - now I’m off to look up their website and think about what I might need to order!

PS the promised blog posting on the privatisation of modernity in contemporary photography really is coming, once it’s been completed and shortened a bit…!

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A couple of ‘new’ images and some thoughts on patience

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I’ve started to have a bit more time - not much, but a bit! - for processing images from last year that in part I hadn’t even had developed, never mind scanned. However, a few weeks ago I took a substantial number of films away for processing (the fridge door is now half-empty again!), and I’ve been scanning film ever since. The images here - added to the Assynt gallery - are both from the same bay, made an hour or two apart (at most). The first image is on Fuji Velvia 50, and is actually the later of the two:

Ardmair/Cul a' Bhodha

The sea in the evening light, after the storm clouds lifted; Ardmair/Cul a’ Bhodha

I think I’m not finished with the processing of the second image, but I want to include it here since it represents a bit of a personal triumph (yes, this may seem slightly pathetic to you!), in that I feel I have finally managed to process Kodak Portra 160 the way I want it:

Ardmair/Cul a' Bhodha

Incoming storm clouds; Ardmair/Cul a’ Bhodha

What is interesting about this on a personal level is that I had tried using Portra quite a bit last year, in part because great photographers like Dav Thomas rave about the tones and dynamic range that it offers. However, I spent much of my processing time fighting to get anything like a semi-decent image from the film scans: everything had subtle but unpleasant greenish colour casts that I couldn’t seem to get rid of: terribly frustrating. Attempting to get skin tones on portraits right was impossible, and landscapes were no better. I should add that this is very subjective: I felt I never managed to get them quite right for me.

Part of this, I now think, was about trying to force myself to get it right too quickly. The key issue is in part simply a matter of white balance and temperature adjustment, but there is much more to it as well, and I just couldn’t get it right. I stopped engaging with Portra last autumn, but in about March of this year I read this detailed article by another enthusiastic Portra user, Tim Parkin. Whilst I didn’t think of this article yesterday when I had my Eureka moment, now that I look back at it, I realise that I had indeed begun to incorporate some elements of Tim’s processing technique. I feel I can go back to the article in detail and work through the parts I really want to use on my images. It’s as if I’m befriending Portra again.

What is key to this development is that it comes in several stages: firstly there was an initial enthusiasm which rapidly became an experience of frustration, eventually leading me to abandon Portra altogether. However, subconsciously the wrestling with Portra was still going on, for why would I have read Tim’s article unless I had intended to use it? Much later, when I had some time and what I loosely call ‘brain-space’, I found I could return to a Portra image and incorporate sufficient key elements of Tim’s techniques to make it work for me. This image here happens to be the one that I started playing with, and at some point I need to finish working on it.

None of this process should come as a great surprise to me because in my academic work this happens regularly. I will often read a book or an article, but struggle to fully understand or engage with it and then simply ‘forget’ about it and read something else. However, I then find my subconscious has been working away at the first text, perhaps with the help of the second, and when I need to write something that would benefit from the first, it simply ‘works’. I go back to it, for sure, but the key arguments and opportunities it offers to develop an argument are already clearly delineated and internalised. I know that it just needs time and patience to let it seep into my system - at least, that’s what it feels like!

Now I can observe that my engagement with photographic techniques seems to follow a similar pattern. I need to cultivate more patience, which those of you who know me will realise is something of a challenge!

Playing with Lightroom 4′s black and white conversion

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I don’t convert many colour images to black and white. In general if I want a black and white image, I tend to use black and white film. I know that there are many people who use specialist conversion software, but given the cost of this kind of thing, I’ve never been that keen on going down this route.

Incoming storm, by Loch Scridain, Isle of Mull (click image to see larger version)

Incoming storm, by Loch Scridain, Isle of Mull (click image to see larger version)

However, I think the new version of Adobe’s Lightroom (we’re at version 4 now) has improved the black and white conversion processing no end. I installed it yesterday, and today I played with an image from a visit to Mull last autumn that I have tried to convert to black and white several times, but never in a way that I was really happy with. Perhaps it just needed multiple experimentations, but I do have a sense that it was considerably easier to achieve this result in version 4 of Lightroom than in version 3. I’m not sure I’m completely finished with it as I wonder if it’s maybe a little bit too dark, but it certainly now represents more of how I felt the landscape, the clouds and the weather appeared to me at the time - the fast-moving storm from the loch off picture to the left, across to the mountains. It corresponds to how I envisaged the image turning out when I took it. A minute or two after squeezing the shutter, I was back in my car, as the rain hammered down.

I don’t normally find software releases very exciting, but it seems to me that Lightroom 4 is a significant improvement on version 3. And if you want to get it at a reduced cost, Adobe has it on offer at a cheaper price at the moment to mark the release…

PS In case you’re interested in these things, the photograph was taken on a Nikon D90 with a 10-24mm lens at 24mm (that’s equivalent to 36mm in full frame terms).

Getting there, slowly

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One of the problems with being off work with an arm injury (and therefore being unable to use the computer properly) is that editing photographs is also a problem: many of the mouse movements are difficult, and repetitive actions strained my arm and hand in ways that prevented me from doing anything very much with any of my images. And using my Wacom tablet was out of the question - and still is.

Now, I have far too many photographs in my optimistically-named ‘temp’ folder in Lightroom 3, just waiting for me to sort and edit them (oh, and go through the mindless but necessary tedium of adding keywords). For almost all of the photographs in that limbo state, this delay is not a problem - they are just my private photographs. But shortly before the accident I had volunteered to take photographs at an event at my son’s school: the older pupils were running a fashion show to help raise some funds, and these photographs needed to be processed urgently. And… I must be getting better since not only am I beginning to use my cameras again, I have also managed to finish the edits on the fashion show, editing photographs in batches.

This was an enjoyable evening, and the pupils’ enthusiasm was infectious - not much sullen strutting up the catwalk in evidence here! Even dubious fashion items (a leather kilt, anyone?) were worn with pride, and many of the young women clearly felt like princesses in their prom dresses and the like. (Must remember not to mention the forthcoming examinations to them…)

School fashion show

School fashion show

Relaxing in the sun

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Ngoni relaxing in the winter sun

Ngoni relaxing in the winter sun

I’m not going to create a new blog entry for every image of Ngoni that I process, but this is one of my favourites! There is something rather mad about being out in the snow in a bikini, but she continually assured me she wasn’t too cold (I was in my thermals, standing in the stream to capture this!). Before you think I’m a sadist who enjoys inflicting cold on my models, one thing you can’t see is that Ngoni is not really sitting in the snow, but on a hot water bottle wrapped in a white cotton bag - her bum and thighs were probably the only part of her that was really warm! I’m beginning to put together some images for a little gallery here, but in the meantime I thought it might be interesting to describe a little some of the processes behind making this image.

Trying to capture her naked skin against the mass of white snow was not completely straightforward, partly because (for the camera, at least), the snow dominates the scene. The camera’s white balance (set to ‘shadow’) still managed to make everything look rather blue, and the snow overwhelmed the camera’s meter, even though I metered for her face (in camera, I didn’t use a lightmeter as I was trying to be as fast as I could to prevent her from getting too cold! Key settings were ISO400, f4.2, 1/60s, the aperture being designed to create a relatively shallow depth of field). But because the camera struggled a bit with the dynamic range, along with correcting the white balance and other general edits in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I needed to carry out some editing just on her body, and others just on the background, involving a tedious selection process (Photoshop’s magic wand etc. found itself being rather confused by the white bikini and the snow, and Ngoni’s legs and the bridge, making a totally manual selection necessary). Still, this allowed very precise edits to be made for Ngoni and the environment.

Also, although she is, of course, the main feature of this photograph, she occupies a relatively small portion of the overall scene. I felt that her rather pale makeup, which worked so well in the other shots from the day, got a bit lost here, so I made some adjustments to her makeup as well, which in the small image here is most noticeable in the form of much darker ‘lipstick’ being used.

I love using Lightroom!

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Ngoni at the window

Ngoni at the window

I do love Adobe Lightroom’s “Develop” module! This image of Ngoni was processed in Lightroom and Photoshop. The Photoshop edits were fairly minimal, and should probably have been done in Lightroom too… this would no doubt have speeded up the editing. The most substantive changes (from cropping to colour HSL settings, clarity, saturation, etc.) were all done in Lightroom, and I really like the end result: I think it almost looks like a pencil drawing. Lightroom makes this kind of processing so fast and simple, I would recommend it for every photographer.

Ngoni is actually standing in front of a door here; I’ll be putting up a gallery of images of our shoot together fairly soon, but for now, this image on RedBubble shows the context.